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The light of your life: a talk for Christmas eve midnight communion

I love Christmas lights –
although probably not to the extent of the Gay family in New York who in 2014
had a display of 601736 lights, which involved about 40 miles of cable.

One wonders what happens when they get tangled. My Christmas lights always get knotted
up. So I was delighted to discover that this
year Tescos have employed a Christmas light untangler. The job advert said that
the person appointed would be able to ‘successfully untangle customers’
Christmas lights neatly, quickly and efficiently and in an orderly fashion.’ Specifically,
they must be able to untangle three metres of Christmas lights in under three
minutes. Whilst that is great news for me, there is a bit of problem. To make
use of the Christmas light untangler I would have to go to the store in Wrexham.

Christmas lights are
special. There is something very poignant about walking in dark streets that
are lit with Christmas lights.

Our reading from John
speaks of Jesus, the Word of God, as the light of the world.

We sometimes say of
someone, ‘She is the light of my life’ What we are saying is that she is the
one who reveals who I truly am. She is the one who, when everything seems so
dark, is with me, helping me know which way to turn, what decisions to make.
She is the one who, when everything is really dark, gives me the hope to carry
on.

So it is not that strange that
Christians speak of Jesus as the light of the world.

‘His life was the light of
all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome
it ... The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world’. (John
1.4-9)

I’d like to draw out three
things from these verses:

1.The world that
Jesus came to is dark

The nativity story is quite
dark. It begins with an emperor issuing a repressive decree. It includes the (in
those days) absolute scandal of an unmarried mother, which might explain why
Joseph and Mary did not stay with some of their relatives in Bethlehem when
they arrived: Mary was persona-non-grata. It included naked state-sponsored violence:
the massacre of the children of Bethlehem. And it ends with a family fleeing,
as refugees, to Egypt.

But the darkness was not
just then.

There is so much violence
in our world: I think of the incident reported recently of the man who stamped
on the stomach of his former pregnant girlfriend. And violence does not need to
be physical. It is in the bile that can be served up on social media, or when
we treat others as sub-human, as vermin, or when we laugh at individuals when
they are mocked.

And there is – and this is
more frightening because it is colder, more clinical, more rational – the violence
committed in the name of a cause: democracy, free speech, communism, science, law
and order, nationalism; and, of course, there are the appalling acts of
violence that we have seen that have been committed in the name of God.

But the darkness is not
just out there. It is also in here

The greed, fear, anger,
hatred and desire for revenge that leads to violence is in here. It would be so
much easier if there were simply evil people out there who we could take out,
and the world would be fine. But actually, as Solzhenitzen wrote, the line
between good and evil is not between good people and evil people, but it is a
line that we each have in our own heart

The dark side is in each
one of us.

Don’t get me wrong. Of course
we are capable of astonishing acts of selfless love, of sacrificial goodness
and gentleness and generosity. But we are also capable of thinking or doing
some of the most awful of things.

We all, to use a phrase
which CS Lewis used, have rats in our cellar. And some of them are big rats
with very big teeth. We can praise God, and then tear someone to pieces with the
teeth of our words.

2. Jesus is
the light who has come into the world.

Listen again to how John
begins his gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and
the Word was God .. In him was life and the life was the light of all people’.

Christians believe that
the baby born in the cowshed on that first Christmas is the very light of God
which, in the beginning, created what we know as physical light.

Someone once said, ‘I
don’t believe in the sun because I see the sun. I believe in the sun because I
see everything in the light of the sun’.

So Jesus is like the sun –
and it is in his light that we see everything else, including physical light.

And John speaks of a
cosmic battle between the light and the darkness. It is a one sided battle
because the darkness has lost the moment that the light turns up.

And even when Jesus, at
the age of 33, was crucified and it seemed that the darkness had finally buried
the light – it hadn’t. Three days later Jesus rose from the dead. ‘The darkness
did not overcome it’.

So Jesus, the Word, the eternal
Son of God, is born and he confronts the darkness. He challenges greed, fear,
anger, hatred and desire for revenge. He challenges pride, lies, hypocrisy and
laziness. He challenges the arrogance that says, ‘There is no God, therefore I
am my own god’, or the smugness that says, ‘I am alright’. He challenges the
cosmic forces of violence, destruction, decay and death.

And Jesus confronts us.

He confronts us with the
reality that until we have accepted him we are like people who have scuttled
into the darkness; we are not sons or daughters of God in that special way.

He confronts us with the
truth of who we truly are: a man or a woman created by God, to live in a
relationship of love and trust in God, with an astonishing dignity, the potential
to become a son or daughter of God – knowing God as my heavenly Father – and the
potential to live like Jesus, even to the extent of sacrificing our lives so
that those who are our enemies now might become our eternal brothers and
sisters, and the potential to know the joy and the peace and the glory of
Jesus.

Jesus also helps us to
face up to and deal with the worst about ourselves: with the reality that there
are rats in our cellar. And unlike much
that goes in the name of psycho-therapy, he does not tell us to live with the
rats, to learn to love the rats – he tells us that the rats need to go. Of
course we can’t get rid of them – but if we let him he is prepared to go down
there, to shine the light on them and to deal with them.

3. We have a
choice: to live as children of light or children of darkness

The light is shining. Our
choice is to come to that light, or to run away into the darkness.

On a website called the
“Experience Project” ​readers were asked to respond to the following statement:
"I prefer darkness over light." A young woman going by the screen
name "Beyond Repair" offered a particularly honest response: “I
prefer darkness over light. The darkness allows me to hide who I am and what I
truly feel. In the light all things have a chance to be revealed …. Darkness
makes it easier to hide. In the dark you cannot see what is coming next …. The
darkness is a place where you can lose yourself. Lost in the dark is a great
place to be because then you are free from what you were and can be what you
want. The darkness is bliss.”

I find that very sad, and
I would love to meet that woman. If I did, I would say to her, “Nobody is ‘Beyond
Repair’. And if you come to the light that I am speaking about, there is someone
who will see you. In the film Avatar, the heroine who has only seen the hero in
his avatar shape, sees him in his human shape. He is dying. She touches this
strange face, and looks in his eyes, and she says, ‘I see you!’

If we allow ourselves to
come to the light we allow ourselves to be seen by the one who really does see.
And yes, he will see the dark stuff, but he won’t laugh at you, or say ‘urgh’
or ‘you’re too boring’ or ‘you’re nobody’. He will say, ‘Thank you for letting
me see who you are. Now let me show you who you can be. Follow me.’ And you can
become not what you think you want to be, but who you were really made to be – a
daughter of God.”

Derek was someone I used
to visit regularly when I was a vicar in London. He was going blind. I loved
going to visit him because, as he lost more and more of his physical sight, he
began to ‘see’ far more of God. He saw himself in a completely new light: both
as someone who had so much dark deep inside him, but also as one dearly beloved
by God. And the promises of Jesus became real for him: promises that God was
his heavenly Father, that Jesus would never leave him, that he was forgiven, that
he was being made new, transformed from the inside out, and that he had an
eternal glorious destiny.

Although Derek was losing
the ability to see the physical light, he was discovering what it meant to see
the true eternal light.

I love the lights of
Christmas. But the true light has come. So I invite us – whoever we are - on
this very special night, to step into the true light. And I pray that Jesus will
be the light of your life.

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